“The massive appropriation of land is the great umbrella of deforestation in Colombia”: Rodrigo Botero

Land grabbing is a long-standing phenomenon in the country and has been one of the drivers of armed conflict. The expansion of the agrarian frontier and the creation of extensive agricultural units has gone hand in hand with massacres and forced displacement of peasants. As reported by different conflict researchers, the land grabbing phenomenon aggravated with the expansion of paramilitarism in the 1990s and 2000s and left a country with a concentration of land that, according to the economist, reaches 0.88 of the GINI coefficient, the highest in South America.

Accumulating land has been the strategy of national landowners and foreign investors to promote agribusiness and extensive cattle ranching. In principle, buying land to use it as large areas is not illegal, but the problem is that here, some people dedicated to this business did it with criminal methods. They took over the nation's vacant lots or forcibly expelled peasants from their plots and then, with the help of corrupt officials, legalized property titles. Much has been written about the this dispossession history and is one of the axes of the report made by the Truth Commission.

Land grabbing is far from ending, and on the contrary, it continues. It has spread through the Colombian highlands and has reached the Amazon, becoming the main driver of deforestation. This activity is clearly illegal, because it appropriates the lands of forest reserve areas, natural parks, and indigenous reservations; it is an umbrella that shelters other drivers of deforestation. Forests are burned and cleared to open roads, plant pastures, maintain extensive cattle ranching or illicit crops, and create large farms... In the end, they are burned and felled to privatize the vacant lots and expand the agricultural frontier.